Your Guide to Software Selection

What Is Enterprise Reporting?

The world of business is full of buzzwords, many of which can have confusing or even contradictory explanations. You’re not alone in your search for simple answers. For example, what is enterprise reporting? Your google search probably spat back mixed information about business software and journalism, and you know that can’t be right. We’re here to simplify and explain! Let’s break down the business definition of enterprise reporting software once and for all.

What Are Enterprise Reporting Tools and What Is Their Purpose?

Enterprise reporting is a strategy for reporting that provides data and insights to decision-makers so they can make data-driven business decisions. That might sound a little vague, so let’s go deeper.

Visualization of data is crucial to our interpretation and understanding of it. And that’s not just because we aesthetically like pretty graphs and flashy charts — we process visual information up to 60,000 times faster than text. While it might take a trained data analyst to notice trends in a huge table of numbers, even your newest intern can recognize patterns in a scattergraph of those same numbers.

These visualizations make it easier for users to draw actionable insights from their proprietary data. Actionable insights, another favorite buzzword, refer to trends and patterns that lead directly to changes in business practices. For example, if a sales organization discovers it’s making good sales in the Midwest, it can direct more resources towards that demographic of buyers to further improve sales metrics. Enterprise reporting aims to empower business professionals to make more informed decisions based on historical data, present analysis and future predictions.

The Difference Between BI and Enterprise Reporting

While the capabilities of enterprise reporting do fall into the umbrella of BI, they are slightly different, so let’s briefly touch on the subject.

Enterprise reporting is a more specific category of analytics software within BI. It focuses on creating reports that allow users to draw insights but does little in the way of guiding those insights. BI is a more robust, intensive and extensive set of features which includes those offered by enterprise reporting.

For many organizations, BI is too sprawling and offers capabilities they don’t need. For others, they prefer to use data analysts or financial planners in the place of software solutions. Whatever the reasons, enterprise reporting software is often a more attainable, more focused option for businesses seeking some lower-level BI capabilities.

How Does Enterprise Reporting Work?

So what do enterprise reporting tools provide? They can generate and deliver a variety of kinds of reports to help users achieve certain goals and undergo a range of types of analysis to make these reports.

Types of Analytics

Descriptive

Descriptive analytics search past data to uncover insights about what has happened in your business historically. This is the most basic form of analysis, merely transforming data points into visualizations for users to analyze and interpret. This type of report is useful for year-end reports, performance management and understanding overall business performance for different time periods.

Diagnostic

If descriptive analytics answer the “what,” diagnostic analytics answer the “why.” Through features like drill-down, data mining, correlation and data discovery, it allows users to focus in on specific data points (for example, a large dip in productivity) and compare different factors to try to understand what caused the dip.

Predictive

Predictive analytics make predictions about the future of your business based on how it has performed in the past. Using a combination of algorithms, machine learning and statistical models, predictive analytics capture correlations in data. Then it can fill in gaps with projections based on previous trends. This forecast is just that — a forecast. It can’t be expected to be 100 percent accurate. But the more historical data the solution has to incorporate, the more accurate the predictions are likely to be. And a close estimate is much better than flying blind!

Prescriptive

Prescriptive analytics are a revolutionary way to take a business plan for a test drive. Using advanced forecasting capabilities, this type of analysis allows users to view the impact of potential decisions on individual metrics and overall business performance. This combines the former three types of analysis to offer users a risk-free way to predict the outcomes of different decisions.

Types of Reports

Dashboards

Dashboards are a portal through which users can view reports and other visualizations. They can be interactive or static, and their main purpose is to present a collection of information like the dashboard of a plane or car. Many enterprise reporting systems allow users to customize their dashboard view to ensure they only see information that is relevant to them.

Windward collects relevant data and portals in a single cohesive dashboard

Performance Management

Although no one likes to feel like their boss is looming over their shoulder, performance management is a vital part of business best practices. You can use outcome-oriented key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the performance of individual employees, departments, locations and more. Enterprise reporting collects and analyzes data trends to help users pinpoint areas where performance can be improved, where it has fallen, etc.

Ad-Hoc

Ad-Hoc reporting is a one-off report generated for a specific query. They are highly customized and narrow in scope, offering detailed data for small areas of your business. These reports are useful for performance management, employee training and generating detailed reports on any kind of unusual KPI.

Features

Enterprise reporting software should offer a core set of features that allow users to perform the types of analysis and generate the kinds of reports mentioned above. Here’s a quick summary of those features:

Pixel Perfect Formatting

Enterprise reporting solutions can format reports to be printed or to fill out a designated online layout to be presented by powerpoint, dashboard or website.

Data Filtering

Data filtering tests data for inclusion or exclusion through user-specified parameters to include only relevant information.

Data Sorting

After data is filtered, the solution lets users sort the data in a report. Sorting controls the order in which data appears — for example, by time period, by region, by sales rep, etc.

Data Grouping

Once data has been filtered and sorted, it needs to be grouped to present trends. Grouping organizes the dataset based on user-specified parameters.

Static and Dynamic Images

Reports can be displayed in a variety of formats in both static and dynamic visualizations. Some examples include JPEG, GIF, PNG, WMF, SVG, etc.

Field Explorer

This feature lets users manage report fields and customize them to fit their business’s unique needs.

Custom Templates

Most enterprise reporting tools come with pre-built reports, but users can also make custom report templates for frequently-needed report types. This makes the process much quicker and easier later on.

Export Capabilities

Users can export reports in a range of formats including Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Workbook, PDF, HTML, and more.

OLAP Reports

Users can create reports using OLAP, or online analytical processing. OLAP analyzes data from different points of view — time periods or locations, for example.

Subreports

Subreports can define their own data sources and can receive parameters from parent reports. This lets users create reports by drawing data from different sources.

What Is the Best Enterprise Reporting Tool?

This is where it gets tricky. While some enterprise reporting tools are more powerful than others, there’s really no one-size-fits-all solution. You can make sure you choose the right tool for your organization, however. Follow these simple steps to find the best enterprise reporting system:

Gather Requirements

The most important step in software selection is to identify your unique requirements. Your organization has specific needs and will use different features than other businesses. This interactive requirements template can help you identify which requirements you want in an enterprise reporting tool. Basing your search on specified requirements helps save you time that would normally be spent narrowing down solutions that aren’t a good fit and will help ensure you don’t end up overpaying for features you won’t use.

Compare Solutions

Once you’ve identified your key requirements, you can use that knowledge to compare platforms. This comparison report breaks down different enterprise reporting solutions based on how well they deliver different features. This process carries out the benefit mentioned in the previous section — just because a product is popular doesn’t mean it will be a good fit for you, so matching up your unique requirements with products that meet them is key.

Shortlist and Request Demos

We recommend choosing the top five or six enterprise reporting tools that best meet your needs and reaching out to those vendors. This is the phase where you can compare pricing, user-friendliness and vendor support. Most software providers give custom quotes, so it’s important not to judge platforms based on general price estimates you see online — they won’t be accurate to your specific situation, so always get a personalized quote.

Most platforms offer a free trial or demo to let customers get used to the software. This step is crucial to ensure you’re happy with the UI of the system: the main reason software implementation fails is poor user engagement with the platform, something that can be greatly mitigated by user-friendly software. You should also verify the amount and type of user support the vendor offers. This can be anything from basic ticketing support packages to 24/7 live tech support and everything in between — each package with a varying price tag.

Once you’ve found a system you like in price, usability and support (or two of the three — the perfect system is sometimes not a reality) you’re ready to start reporting!